Melati Suryodarmo: Wet Bodies

In Melati Suryodarmo’s present series, we are presented with another form of how today’s artists experiment with the representation of performing bodies through water and pigment. The performance artist’s entropic release takes the form of gouache-stained abstracted figures in motion. Where we often consume Suryodarmo’s works as a public presentation of the artist’s body, these drawings are made in the private spaces of the artist of which we are not invited. These are products of the most intimate moments in Suryodarmo’s process during which she spills her secrets onto paper. She calls these spills “impressions of [her] being”, or projections of the indescribable and often blurry constructs of her memories. As is with her performance work, the unspooling energy of her brushstrokes create transforming works; they are evolving as she goes till the moment she eventually relinquishes the tool, and steps back to contemplate the avatar conjured in front of her. This is another form of that possibility for the transmission of performance practice, for watercolour’s ability to archive visceral embodied knowledge as externalised visions of the self.

Words by Denise Lai